NAB Show 2026 wrapped up last week in Las Vegas, and we left with something special in hand: the NAB Show Product of the Year Award in the Cloud Computing and Storage category—this time for Backblaze B2 Neo.
It’s a meaningful recognition, and one that reflects where we see the media and AI infrastructure market heading. Here’s a look at what the recognition means, and why B2 Neo matters.
What this recognition means
Winning the NAB Product of the Year Award reflects something we genuinely believe: that storage infrastructure is a foundational capability for modern media and AI platforms, not an afterthought or a separate vendor relationship to manage.
The NAB Show brings together the best of the media and entertainment industry, and having B2 Neo recognized in this context—among platforms solving real, production-scale problems across streaming, OTT, AI-driven media processing, and large-scale content delivery—is meaningful validation that the approach resonates.
B2 Neo launched in February 2026 and is already supporting production workloads including AI training pipelines, high-performance computing environments, and large-scale media delivery. The response from platform providers has reinforced what we know: organizations want to offer integrated, high-performance storage without building it from scratch, and they want the economics to make sense.
What is B2 Neo?
B2 Neo is a high-performance, S3-compatible cloud object storage solution purpose-built for platforms running data-intensive media and AI workloads. But describing it simply as “cloud storage” undersells the point.
The key distinction: B2 Neo is a white-label service. Rather than selling storage directly to end users, B2 Neo enables platform providers—like media workflow vendors—to offer fully integrated storage under their own brand. Partners launch their own storage service with custom endpoints, pricing, and user experiences, without having to build or operate the underlying infrastructure themselves.
The result is that platforms can go from “we don’t offer storage” to “we have a native, high-performance storage tier” in weeks rather than years, with none of the capital investment or engineering overhead that building it in-house would require.
Why it was built
The problem B2 Neo addresses has been growing for years, but it’s become acute as streaming, OTT, and AI-driven media workflows scale up.
Compute has gotten fast, distributed, and relatively affordable. GPU clusters, edge networks, and CDNs can all handle increasingly complex workloads. But storage has often lagged behind—fragmented across providers, expensive to move data in and out of, and either too costly or too operationally burdensome to build in-house.
The consequence is real: GPU clusters sit idle waiting on data. Streaming pipelines bottleneck on access speeds. Media organizations duplicate content across storage systems because no single layer integrates cleanly into the rest of the stack.
B2 Neo was designed to remove that bottleneck. It delivers up to 1Tbps of throughput to ensure that compute resources—GPU clusters, streaming systems, edge delivery networks—are never waiting on storage. It combines that performance with Backblaze’s 17+ years of operational experience at exabyte scale, and wraps it in an API-first architecture that plugs directly into partner platforms.
How it works
From a technical standpoint, B2 Neo delivers high aggregate throughput using cost-efficient, disk-based infrastructure with strategically deployed flash layers—a write-through cache design that captures the performance benefits of flash without the cost and scalability limitations that come with an all-flash architecture at the multi-petabyte scale that media and AI workloads require.
For workloads where throughput matters as much as latency—moving large video files, training AI models, serving content at scale—this approach is particularly effective. It allows platforms to maintain a centralized data repository and efficiently deliver data to compute providers, edge networks, and CDNs without duplicating data across storage systems.
API-driven provisioning lets partners programmatically create and manage storage accounts, permissions, and billing within their existing systems. Whether a partner is running an OTT platform, a media asset management system, or an AI training pipeline, B2 Neo integrates as a native extension of that environment rather than an external dependency to work around.
Included egress and free API calls round out the picture, eliminating the usage-based fees that typically make storage decisions financially complicated.
What’s next
This is a product that will keep evolving alongside the media and AI infrastructure landscape. We’re working closely with early partners to expand B2 Neo’s capabilities—performance, integration depth, provisioning flexibility—and we’ll have more to share as those conversations develop.
If you’re building or operating a platform that would benefit from embedded, high-performance storage, we’d love to talk. Reach out to our team to learn more about what a B2 Neo partnership looks like.
See you at NAB Show 2027!
